Jersey Roots is a look at the history of Monmouth and Ocean counties. Have a local historical topic you would like more information about? Contact Erik Larsen at elarsen@app.com.

This sounds like a scene out of HBO's "Boardwalk Empire." As a matter of fact, it was — albeit a fictionalized account of the true story I'm about to share.

Just before Warren G. Harding was elected president in 1920, the then-U.S. senator from Ohio made living arrangements for his mistress at a house on Bond Street in Asbury Park after she had become pregnant as a result of their affair.

When the relationship began, Nan Britton was 20 and Harding was 52 and a married man. Two years into the tryst, their daughter Elizabeth Ann Blaesing was born in Asbury Park on Oct. 22, 1919. The name on the birth certificate read Elizabeth Ann Christian, the surname of Harding's male secretary, in an obvious effort to protect the rising Republican star who was about to kick start a presidential campaign.

Harding never met his daughter. However, he did arrange for child support payments to be discreetly made to Britton through his aides. As it would turn out, Britton was not the president's only paramour during this period.

As his father, George Tryon Harding once remarked, the president was fortunate not to have been born a girl, as his lack of self-discipline would surely have kept him "in the family way" in perpetuity.

Harding's other known extramarital affair, which to date has no known relevant connection to the Garden State, has been making news throughout the country this summer.

As USA Today reported June 25, the Library of Congress is scheduled to release on July 29 some 1,000 pages of love letters between Harding and a woman named Carrie Fulton Phillips, who was a friend of his wife. Harding and Phillips began having an affair in 1905, but ended their sexual relationship before his inauguration in March 1921.

Most of the letters were written between 1910 and 1920, including the years when Harding served in the U.S. Senate. The letters were found by the guardian of Phillips' estate after she died in 1960 and were eventually purchased by George Harding, a nephew of the late president. Harding later donated the letters to the Library of Congress with the stipulation that the papers not be made public until July 29, 2014, 50 years from the day a probate judge first closed them, all according to the USA Today story.

History has not been kind to our 29th president. Harding is frequently rated by historians as one of the worst in American history, in large part because of the number of unscrupulous friends and associates he appointed to his cabinet. The most egregious example is when his Secretary of Interior Albert Bacon Fall accepted bribes in exchange for leasing federal oil reserves — only to be used in a time of national emergency — to various private oil companies. The matter became known as the Teapot Dome Scandal, after one of the oil reserves plundered in Wyoming.

As for Harding, he died in office on Aug. 2, 1923 while on a visit to San Francisco a little more than two years into his term and was succeeded by Vice President Calvin Coolidge. Popular legend persists to this day that first lady Florence Harding might have poisoned her husband out of revenge for his infidelity. But based on the evidence, historians think his death was probably the result of a stroke or heart attack.

With Harding dead, the child support payments to Britton stopped. But she had the last word when in 1927 she wrote America's first tell-all book, entitled "The President's Daughter," which was as scandalous to the era as it was a best-seller. Britton died in 1991 and her daughter in 2005.